For instance, Locke perceives the law of nature to preside over the state of nature, in which individuals and their properties are not necessarily in constant danger. Conversely, Hobbes’s state of nature is the state of war, which cause men to come to the conclusion that they must always be in pursuit of peace.

The Enlightenment’s important 17th-century precursors included the Englishmen Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, the Frenchman René Descartes and the key natural philosophers of the Scientific Revolution, including Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Baron de Montesquieu

The Natural Condition of Mankind. The state of nature is “natural” in one specific sense only. For Hobbes political authority is artificial: in the “natural” condition human beings lack government, which is an authority created by men.

Hobbes viewed the state of nature as a hypothetical situation where every man was against every man and in that state, which is war, there was no right or wrong and no justice or injustice. Hobbes’ state of war allowed man to do anything in his power to avoid death, even at the expense of others.

For Locke, in the state of nature all men are free “to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature.” (2nd Tr., §4). “The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it”, and that law is reason.

It is essentially a state of complete freedom. Political theorists have used it to better understand human nature and, typically, to justify the rationality of a particular type of government. Proponents claim that the state of nature provides insight into the inherent dispositions and inclinations of human beings.

Rousseau favors a rough equality of property and rank only as a means of preserving equality of rights and not as something valuable in itself. (See, for example, SC pp. 367 and 391.)